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If I download a PDF in Chrome (even from Drive), on any platform, and click on the downloaded-file-button down the bottom, the PDF opens in Chrome in a viewer that includes a table of contents browser, smart zoom controls and other features.
If, on the other hand, I double click on it in Drive, it opens in Chrome but in a preview style viewer that is very limited, with none of the features above.
How do I get Chrome to open PDFs from Drive... well, in Chrome?
You can open a PDF in the Chrome PDF Viewer from Google Drive by (mis)using the print feature.
Print icon.The PDF should now be open in the Chrome PDF Viewer.
the solution is to use this kind of url :
https://drive.google.com/uc?print=false&id={file_id}
If you're doing this from a Chromebook, Google Drive is mounted in 'Files', so you can just navigate to the pdf file from there, double click on it, and it will open in Chrome directly. An alternative (because sometimes 'Files' takes a while to update from Google Drive), is to open Drive & mis-use the Print feature per ARM32's answer.
As per https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2423485, "Double-click a file: if you open a PDF it will open in Google Drive."
But once it happens, you can click the download icon, which is pretty hidden in the webpage's far top right/left corner (depends if you're in a LTR or RTL language):
and you'll get the same desired behavior as you've described in your first paragraph.
It's pretty easy to generate a direct download link, but it's good for specific links, not for casual browsing. In articles that explain how to generate such links, you might see comments wondering how come there's no extension for this...
